On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Thomas Zander wrote:

> On Thursday 15. November 2007 10:21:24 Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > I set my close button on the left, on its own (instead of, as Aaron
> > suggests, on the right)
> 
> This sounds fine at first, until you realize that all dialogs have 'Cancel' on 
> the right. Our 'clear' buttons are on the right and now our window close 
> button is also on the right.

I never noticed the inconsistency, probably because I never noticed
any parallel between dialog buttons and window buttons or line edits
and clear buttons. I don't care much one way or another, because I'll
change the settings back to what works for my anyway. But I think my
reasons are good reasons.

> Which means a much more consistent way of working across the board and that 
> gives your muscle memory much more reason to develop.

I seriously doubt that. Sure, there is a link between dialog buttons
and window buttons on a conceptual level, but that does go only so
far. I think the top vs bottom location, the diffence in shape, size and
presence/absence of text and the grouping of dialog buttons vs ungrouping
of window buttons (or are we going to put all non-close dialog buttons
on the left of the dialog, too?) make sure that the conceptual similarity
is beyond the grasp of any muscle memory.

> Oh, unless you switch between MacOs and KDE, then you might like the 
> suggestion you pasted more since they have (had?) close on the left ;)

They probably have it there for a reason. Maybe they put the window size
management buttons on the top-right because the windows-size grip is on
the bottom-right, making the right-hand side the window size management
side? (Which in itself is logical: if you popup a new window on an empty
desktop it starts aligned left, not right, so if you want to resize it,
you drag the size-grip to the right in OS X. The other borders are not
active, so if it started on the right-hand side of the screen, you'd
have to move it first before resizing. Kwin has active borders, but we
also put the size-grip on the right-hand side, not the left-hand side.

Boudewijn